Today is July 10 as I’m writing this. It’s late, though, so most of you probably won’t see it for a day or two. But there are half a dozen birthdays I want to highlight. I’m going to start with the person who was probably the most significant in terms of the coverage of this blog. That’s Carl Jacobi.

Carl Jacobi

Carl Jacobi (1908-1997) wrote only short fiction. If he wrote any novels, I’m not a ware of them. He started out wrtiing for Weird Tales. His first story was published in 1928. His most famous story is “Revelations in Black”, a vampire tale. It was also the title of his first collection, which was originally published by Arkham House in 1947.

Jacobi had a wide range. He  didn’t limit himself to just weird fiction. I’ve not seen a comprehensive bibliography of his work. D. H. Olson gave a eulogy at Jacobi’s funeral. It has been reprinted at Black Gate. I encourage you to read it here.

Greye La Spina (1880-1969) produced only a small body of work, it was well received in its day. Her first published story was “Wolf of the Steppes” in the March 1, 1919 issue of The Thrill Book. Many of her best known stories were published in Weird Tales. While never prolific, she produced a solid body of weird fiction.

John Wyndham

John Wyndham (1903-1969) whose full name was John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Benyon Harris, was primarily a science fiction writer who is best remembered for writing the novel that became the basis of the movie The Day of the Triffids. But the novel of his that I most like is The Midwich Cukoos. It was the basis of the film Village of the Damned. 

A mystreious dome appears over a small British village. Everyone inside the dome loses consciousness. There are a few awkward moments when everyone wakes up, such as the married man who broke his neck falling down the stairs in the home of a woman not his wife.

Then every woman in the village who is physically capable of bearing children turns up pregnant. That”s when the book gets really creepy. Wyndham really gets inside those people’s heads.

Wyndham was British, and he wrote under a vareity of names. The most well-known outside of the Wyndham byline is probably John Benyon Harris. Subterranean Press has recently released a collection of his short stories. He is another author whose work deserves to be kept in print.

Joe Shuster (1914-1992) was the cocreator of Superman, along with Jerry Seigel. I’ll  not try to summarize Shuster’s career in this post. He made a significant contribution to the field of the fantastic in general and comics in pparticular and deserves a mention.

George Clayton Johnson (1929-2015) is notable for two reasons. First, he wrote for the original Twilight Zone. The second reason is that along with William F. Nolan, he wrote Logan’s Run. For you young whippersnappers who may not be old enough to remember it, Logan’s Run was a novel about a society in which everyone must undergo mandatory euthanasia at the age of twenty-one. (In the movie and television show, it was thirty.) Nolan wrote two sequels, which are kinda hard to find these days. I thought I read somewhewre taht Johnson wrote his own sequel., but I ccan’t find anything to confirm that.

Johnson’s short fiction was collected in All of Us Are Dying (1999).

Now we come to the one writer whose work I’ve not read except for the story “Dune Roller”, which I read in The Great SF Stories # 13. That is probably her most reprinted story. She was a major writer in the 1980s with  her Pliocene Exile series. I’ve got them but I haven’t read them yet. I picked them up at a Friends of the Library sale. If anyone has read them, or May’s other work, please let us know what you think of it in the comments.

David G. Hartwell

This post is rather long, but I don’t want to end it without mentioning one last person, an editor. David G. Hartwell (1941-2016). Hartwell was an editor at Signet, Pocket, and Tor books. He created the Timescape line as well as the Star Trek line while at Pocket.  He also founded The New York Review of Science Fiction.

As a book editor he, along with his wife Kathryn Cramer, edited the landmark anthologies Foundations of Fear, The Dark Descent, The Hard SF Renaissance, and The Space Opera Renaissance. He also editedd or co-edited an number of smaller anthologies.

But the anthology series that I really liked were The Year’s Best SF (eighteen volumes) and The Year’s Best Fantasy (nine volumes). Both series were coedited by his wife, Kathryn Kramer. These were always one of the highlights of the summer. I ususally picked them up at a convention, either Armadillocon or Conestoga, if memory serves. The amazing thing about the science fiction volumes was that they had so little overlap with Gardner Dozois’s best of the year anthologies that were being published at the same time.

I met Hartwell a several science fiction conventions over the years. He was always appraochable and easy to talk to. He never was rude or in a hurry. One of the things he would do at conventions was to wear a loud coat and tie, the louder the better. He passed away due to a head injury sustained when he fell down a flight of stairs in his  house. He was sevety-four. I miss him.

So there we are, a baker’s half dozen of birthdays for July 10. Some days there aren’t any birthdays to write about. Some days, there are almost more than I can get to.

Any thoughts on these writers and editors and there work, feel free to leave in the comments.